by Jim Hoover

With the ruthless and relentless monolithic corporate assault on anything getting in the way of stellar profits, it is easy to imagine any number of dirty tricks to achieve this end.

The cause of greed has many allies in government and business.

For example, Governor Scott Walker has been plastered all over the media in his effort to do the bidding of two of America’s richest corporate heads, the Koch Brothers. Walker’s effort to destroy the public unions in Wisconsin has been exposed by spunky Wisconsin workers, crowding the streets of major cities.

The Walker budget has ruthlessly cut education spending and has opened the door to lucrative contracts for private companies like Koch Industries to take over public services.

Over a million dollars of Koch Industries money seems to have been made available to get Scott Walker elected governor of Wisconsin. Of course, the fake David Koch call to Walker revealed a puppeteer-puppet connection between the two.

Other states electing Republican governors have also displayed a willingness to make the middle class pay for the downturn caused by Wall Street’s looting. Florida and Michigan are taking from schools and giving to the rich in tax cuts.

Michigan specifically passed laws that give individuals or corporations the power to take over municipalities in financial trouble – determined by the Republican governor or even the person or company the governor put in charge.

So the assumed Machiavellian perspective of big business goes to space.

After the second straight failure of the Glory satellite launch last Friday, which was intended to measure global warming attributed to man, can you blame some writers for suggesting plutocratic involvement in the launch failures?

After all, these same corporate lobbyists are pushing the Republican-dominated House to kill EPA efforts to restrict activity that adds CO2 to the atmosphere.

In that $61 billion budget cut Republicans are proposing 30% in EPA cuts that would bar the EPA from regulating greenhouse gas emissions and from implementing new water pollution limits in the Chesapeake Bay watershed and in Florida.

After the 2009 failure, Orbital Science Corporation’s second launch of the Taurus XL rocket carrying the Orbiting Carbon Observatory (OCO) brought total losses for NASA to some $700 million. It was attributed to the same problem, a detachable nose heat shield failing to detach.

It seems that the low success rate of the Taurus XL rocket, some 62% in 9 launches, would preclude any need for sabotage. One could easily wonder why NASA is sticking with Orbital Science when the European Space Agency has a similar rocket in Ariane V with a success rate of 95% over the past 56 launches.

Certainly the plutocrats couldn’t have chosen a company which seems to promote their interests better.